>>I was wanting to know if anyone could help me discern >>between the occult and Satanism.

Occult means "hidden knowledge". It's a very vague term used to label any practice whose power is attributed to the supernatural or supernormal. Things like divination, spell casting, talking to spirits, dowsing, and voodoo zombification are all often lumped into the category of "occult".

Satanism is the name of a specific, well-defined, organized religion formulated in the 1960s by Anton Szandor LaVey. To learn more, keep reading the book that you're allegedly reading.

Satanism is often mislabeled as an occult religion because we like making use of esotericism (albeit for esoteric sake) and because Christians like to misuse the terms "occult" and "Satanism" to both mean any "weird" practice or symbols which of course they readily attribute to their own religion's "Satan". Though speaking as a Satanist myself, I tend to find most occultists and Christians to be rather intolerable twits.